She's one of the few people able to look beyond the lines on my face to see the twenty-year-old who lives inside.

Even the most pragmatic person fell victim at times to a longing for something other.

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

Adults weren’t supposed to understand their children and you were doing something wrong if they did.

Round and round the questions flew, until finally I found myself standing at the open door of a bookshop. It’s natural in times of great perplexity, I think, to seek out the familiar, and the high shelves and long rows of neatly lined-up spines were immensely reassuring. Amid the smell of ink and binding, the dusty motes in beams of strained sunlight, the embrace of warm, tranquil air, I felt that I could breathe more easily.

... for home is a magnet that lures back even its most abstracted children.

After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.